Policy Scotland is delighted that Children’s Neighbourhoods Scotland features strongly in the Scottish Government’s Child Poverty Delivery Plan. Children’s Neighbourhoods Scotland is an innovative place-based approach designed to tackle child poverty by supporting the collective impact of services and community empowerment to improve outcomes for all children in a neighbourhood. The programme, which has been developed in Dalmarnock in Glasgow – will be extended at a cost of £2 million into another urban centre, a small town and a rural community. The programme has a strong international pedigree and aims to develop services to reduce poverty, extend power within communities, and improve outcomes for children and young people. Children’s Neighbourhoods Scotland is an innovative collaboration between Policy Scotland and What Works Scotland at the University of Glasgow and the Glasgow Centre for Population Health at the Social Research Hub at Olympia in the East End of Glasgow.
Professor Chris Chapman, Director of Policy Scotland who is leading the Children’s Neighbourhood team said:
“This substantial commitment by Scottish Government over four years, is testimony to all of the team’s hard work establishing a robust collaboration between the University and Glasgow Centre for Population Health and dedication to building authentic relationships with the community, key stakeholders and service providers. We now have the resources and permissions needed to build on our early work by embedding and extending this approach across Glasgow and other neighbourhoods throughout Scotland”.
Working with a range of public, third sector and private partners, Children’s Neighbourhoods Scotland is a research-led, place-based approach designed to support communities and services to tackle poverty and inequalities in neighbourhoods across Scotland. Our place-based approach is a distinctively Scottish approach that draws on the learning and lessons from across Scotland, the rest of the UK and further afield. Children’s Neigbourhoods Scotland is not a quick fix. It is a long-term sustainable way of working designed to tackle intergenerational cycles of inequality by bringing communities and services together in new and exciting ways. This requires building strong and trusting relationships and rethinking roles and responsibilities to better meet the specific needs of children in particular neighbourhoods.
In addition to developing additional Children’s Neighbourhoods in Glasgow, Policy Scotland anticipates prototyping the model in different contexts including urban, town and rural settings to establish which elements of the model are transferable across different contexts in Scotland and which relate to specific contexts. In this sense we are developing an evidence-based framework and set of principles that can improve outcomes for children in neighbourhoods across Scotland.
More information on Children’s Neighbourhoods can be found at: childrensneighbourhoodsscotland.com.
